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In this day and age, many women choose to establish a career first before they focus on starting a family. Ladies are warned that having a baby over the age of 35 can cause pregnancy complications and a higher risk of miscarriage and a woman’s chance of giving birth to a baby with Down syndrome also increase the older she is. However fresh research from California suggests there also benefits to welcoming a baby later in life; namely you’ll live longer.
Based on a study of 20,000 women in the U.S. researchers at the University of California, San Diego found that women who had their first baby between the age of 25 and 29 were 11 per cent more likely to reach the age of 90 compared the ladies who gave birth before 25.
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The chance of living to 90 only dropped by one per cent, down to 10 per cent, for women who had their first child at 30.
The amount of times a woman has been pregnant also had an impact on life expectancy, with women who had carried a baby between two and four times more likely to live into their 90s compared to women who had never been pregnant, and 25 per cent more likely than ladies who had been pregnant once.
Results have been published in the American Journal of Public Health, with researchers suggesting several theories for their findings.
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One is that women who survive older, and often riskier, pregnancies are likely to be inherently healthier. Another is that delaying starting a family is done by women who come from comfortable and wealthy backgrounds.
Doctors also suggest that pregnancy itself has a protective effect on a woman.
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